The mushrooms on the Sunshine Coast decided that 2017 would be a fallow year, a time for them to take a complete rest, gearing up to return next year in amazing abundance. At least that’s what I’ve been telling myself.

A number of dyers didn’t even show themselves this year, at least not in my usual patches, including Dermocybes, Sarcodon fuscoindicus, Hydnellum aurantiacum and H. peckii, and Hypomyces lactifluorum. So I’m carefully using up most of last year’s stash while thinking of other ways I can make use of the few mushrooms I still have (as in eco-printing and, if I can figure out a way to make it happen, with kombucha—but more of that later).

All of this to say that I haven’t been in my studio lately as much as I’d like. From the evidence I found this week when I lifted the lid off what I thought was an empty dyepot sitting on my outside workbench . . .

. . . I’ve been away far too long! I went back to my notes and discovered I’d processed this Phaeolus pot with iron-mordanted roving over a month ago, and clearly a fungus of a different sort found the wool attractive, at least the parts exposed to air. I pulled the fibre out and found little black bits where the mould had found good resting spots.

I’m hoping to get a good supply of this lovely green, enough for a large spinning project, so I couldn’t bear to see this wool go to waste. As it turned out, after I washed the roving and pulled off the black bits, there seems to be no harm done.

I’m glad this is a forgiving medium.

Last week I found a cluster of these striking mushrooms on a fallen alder just steps from my studio.  I took this image four years ago when the tree was still standing and the mushrooms more photogenic.  I’m not bothering to make a dyepot with these this year—they cook up into a thick stew that requires serious straining, and once when I left them a bit before cooking, the strained bits included many little white maggoty things—but because I’m still waiting to find that amazing flush of exciting dyers this year, I thought I’d post these Pholiota squarrosoides samples from 2014 and 2015—a pleasant gold—should any of you be curious enough to give them a try. (The four sample strands on the card, from top to bottom and ignoring the knot at the top: no mordant, copper, iron, alum.)

Mind you, I have nothing against pleasant gold, but an over-abundance of Phaeolus schweinitzii, now drying on my studio floor, promises more gold this year than I really care to think about just now.

(Am I sounding a touch disappointed?)

The activity in my dyepots has slowed down lately, as my deck workspace is open to the afternoon sun, and my Nordic blood doesn’t take kindly to intense summer (well, almost-summer) heat. So I’m concentrating my efforts on combining mushroom colours, which always seem to go well together no matter which ones I choose.

I ran these colours through my drumcarder in lengthwise stripes: the yellow and bright gold (not all that visible, but it’s there) are from Dyer’s Polypore (Phaeolus schweinitzii), as is the forest green (resulting from an iron mordant). The blue is from a successful Hydnellum aurantiacum dyepot, while the peach colour resulted from overdyeing a not-so-vibrant Phaeolus exhaust with the exhaust from a Lobster (Hypomyces lactifluorum) dyepot.

I won’t get to the spinning for a few weeks—I’m off to Toronto in early June to teach a one-day workshop at the Contemporary Textile Studio Co-op, where I’m looking forward to comparing mushroom notes with students from that part of Canada.

I still find it hard to believe that this luxurious purple comes from a mushroom, Hapalopilus rutilans. This is a small, brown, unassuming shelf fungus found on birch trees, trees that don’t grow in our coastal rainforest—this dyepot was the result of a gift from Sweden.

I like to throw a handful of angelina, a sparkly synthetic fibre, into dyepots to see what colour it will pick up—it’s not always what I expect. (The angelina is sitting on the lighter bundle of roving, which came from the exhaust bath.)

The roving didn’t dye evenly, as I didn’t move it around much in the dyepot—the variation makes for some interesting spinning. I used a ratio of two parts mushrooms to one part fibre.

The mordants on the bundle of test strands, left to right: no mordant, alum, iron, and copper. The sample bits of fibre threaded onto the card, from top to bottom: alum first bath, angelina, alum exhaust bath, iron from a second cooking of the mushrooms.

The copper strand came out a rich, coppery brown. I have enough dried mushrooms for another dyepot, and I think I may have to do that one with a copper mordant.

A cousin to this mushroom,  H. nidulans, has been found in northern British Columbia, so I think a trip to the birch forests of the Cariboo would be in order later this year. Two dyepots are clearly not enough!